The Platypus Review Issue 58 July-August 2013

Issue #58 /July-August 201 3

Staff

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Sunit Singh

MANAGING EDITOR

Nathan L. Smith

EDITORS

Spencer A. Leonard
Laurie Rojas
Josh Rome
James Vaughn

COPY EDITORS

Jacob Cayia
Lucy Parker
Emmanuel Tellez

PROOF EDITOR

Edward Remus

DESIGNER

Brian Hioe

WEB EDITOR

Ninad Pandit

Statement of purpose

Taking stock of the universe of positions and goals that
constitutes leftist politics today, we are left with the
disquieting suspicion that a deep commonality underlies
the apparent variety: What exists today is built upon the
desiccated remains of what was once possible.

In order to make sense of the present, we find it
necessary to disentangle the vast accumulation of posi-
tions on the Left and to evaluate their saliency for the
possible reconstitution of emancipatory politics in the
present. Doing this implies a reconsideration of what is
meant by the Left.

Our task begins from what we see as the general
disenchantment with the present state of progressive
politics. We feel that this disenchantment cannot be cast
off by sheer will, by simply "carrying on the fight," but
must be addressed and itself made an object of critique.
Thus we begin with what immediately confronts us.

The Platypus Review is motivated by its sense that the
Left is disoriented. We seek to be a forum among a va-
riety of tendencies and approaches on the Left— not out
of a concern with inclusion for its own sake, but rather
to provoke disagreement and to open shared goals as
sites of contestation. In this way, the recriminations and
accusations arising from political disputes of the past
may be harnessed to the project of clarifying the object
of leftist critique.

The Platypus Review hopes to create and sustain a
space for interrogating and clarifying positions and orien-
tations currently represented on the Left, a space in which
questions may be raised and discussions pursued that
would not otherwise take place. As long as submissions
exhibit a genuine commitment to this project, all kinds of
content will be considered for publication.

The

Platypus Review #

Issue #58 I July-August 2013

1 Marx's liberalism?

An interview with Jonathan Sperber

Spencer A. Leonard and Sunit Singh

Aging in the afterlife

The many deaths of art

Anton VidokLe, Gregg Horowitz, Paul Mattick, and Yates McKee
WWW:

Program and Utopia

Roger Rashi, Sam Gindin, Stephen Eric Bronner, Aaron Benanav, and Richard Rubin

Submission guidelines

Articles will typically range in length from 750-4,500
words, but longer pieces will be considered. Please send
article submissions and inquiries about this project to:
review_editortdplatypusl917.org. All submissions should
conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.

The Platypus Review is funded by:

The University of Chicago Student Government

Dalhousie Student Union

Loyola University of Chicago

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Student Government

The New School

New York University

The Platypus Affiliated Society

www. platypus! 91 7.org

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3 The Platypus Review

Issue #58 /July-August 201 3

Marx'S liberalism?, continued from page 1

ger be an identifiable group. Seen from the point of view
of the 20 th century, with the Nazi and Stalinist persecu-
tions of the Jews, this is very embarrassing. Indeed,
many have denounced Marx as an anti-Semite and a
proto-Nazi. One of the things I argue in the book is that
this is a false perspective on the essay. What we actually
see here is Marx making a very interesting distinction
between what he calls "political emancipation" and "hu-
man emancipation." He argues that the emancipation
of the Jews would involve granting them equal rights
with Christians and the creation of a society like in the
United States with a separation between church and
state, which marked a crucial step in the completion of
the program of the French Revolution.

Now if Marx had stopped there, no one could have
accused him of being an anti-Semite. But Marx believed
that the completion of the program of the French Revo-
lution [the creation of a democratic republic, a society
in which people were equal under the law, an end to
discrimination on the basis of religion or race], while
a historic step forward from the old regime society of
orders, itself created a society marked by alienation
and capitalist exploitation. So, in the second part of the
essay on the Jewish Question, the part which tends to
offend people, he went on to argue that true human
emancipation requires an end to this capitalist society
of alienation, exploitation, and the separation of state
and society. This is the beginning of his Hegelian argu-
ment for the creation of a communist regime. It seems
in some ways an odd argument. Marx was saying that
Jews needed to be emancipated in order to act freely as
members of civil society, but that when they do that, the
moneyed among them will simply end up as capitalist
exploiters. So the question becomes: Why would you
bother doing this in the first place?

What Marx was talking about? And this becomes a
central element of his political aspirations, a dilemma
he would wrestle with for the subsequent 40 years: How
would it be possible to do both, to complete the tasks of
the French Revolution by overthrowing monarchies and
creating democratic republics and societies of equal
citizens, but to also go beyond that by creating a com-
munist society in which alienation was abolished, and
society, the state, and individuals were harmonized?
Trying to carry out these two revolutionary acts at once
turned out to be impossible. Marx never found a way to
resolve this issue.

SL: One major theme of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century
Life is that, as you have indicated already, Marx under-
stood himself as heir to the French Revolution. Specifi-
cally, Marx expected and, indeed, in perhaps the most
famous passages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, described 19 th century revolution as a repeti-
tion of the 18 th century French Revolution, particularly in
its 1 789-1 794 phase. Thus, Marx simultaneously longs
for the revolutionary poetry of the future even as he
argues that the past necessarily recurs. You describe
Marx's thinking at the time of the Revolution of 1848-49
as follows:

Using his influential position within the newly re-
organized Communist League... Marx took scant
time to join the revolutionary fray. For a little over
a year, from the spring of 1848 through the spring
of 1849, Marx was, for the first and last time in his
life, an insurgent revolutionary: editing in brash,
subversive style the New Rhineland News; becom-
ing a leader of the radical democrats of the city of
Cologne and of the Prussian Rhineland; trying to
organize the working class in Cologne and across
Germany; and repeatedly encouraging and fo-
menting revolution. In all of these activities, Marx
persistently promoted the revolutionary strategy
he had first envisioned in his essay on the Jew-
ish Question, and would present in scintillating
language in the Communist Manifesto. He pressed
for a democratic revolution to destroy the authori-
tarian Prussian monarchy. At the same time he
aspired to organize the working class to carry out
a communist uprising against a capitalist regime
he expected such a democratic revolution to estab-
lish. In effect, Marx was proposing a double recur-
rence of the French Revolution: A repetition of its
1789-1794 phase in mid-nineteenth century Prus-
sia, and also a workers' seizure of power... (195)

And, again, when you come to address the Manifesto
itself, you note the magnetic influence of the French
Revolution upon its programmatic aspect. "The ten-
point program in the Manifesto," you write, "was de-
signed for a revolutionary government, one modeled on
the radical, Jacobin phase of the French Revolution in
1789" (210). How and why does Marx, who is, after all,
the great theorist of modernity's historical dynamism,
also view history as subject to this sort of repetition
such that he expects the French Revolutionary past to
return under changed conditions?

JS: Maybe we need to revise our notions about Marx's
attitude toward modernity's historical dynamism. Marx's
political thought— like that most of his contempo-
raries'—was centered on the French Revolution. This
was just a reality that dominated the first two-thirds of
19 th century Europe. When people thought about poli-
tics, they thought about it in terms of the French Revo-
lution. Marx was no exception in that respect. What's
interesting about Marx is this idea of what I like to call
the "double recurrence" of the French Revolution. On
the one hand, the French Revolution would literally
recur in Central and Eastern Europe, with an upris-
ing against the Prussian and Austrian monarchies and
their replacement by a revolutionary German Republic.
This would probably include a revolutionary war against
the Tsar— a literal rerun of 1793 in mid-19 ,h -century
Germany. But there would also be a recurrence by
analogy. That is, Marx saw the bourgeoisie as seizing
power, bringing the feudal society of orders to an end,
and replacing it with a capitalist economy. By anal-
ogy, the workers would do the same thing: They would
overthrow capitalism and create a communist society.
Marx wants to do both at once in 1848, but he finds it
very difficult. He discovers, in trying to overthrow the
Prussian monarchy, that you can't get the workers riled
up against the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie

then won't support you in overthrowing the monarchy.
In his speech to the Cologne Democratic Society in Au-
gust 1848, he ends up describing the class struggle as
nonsense. The problem was that organizing the workers
against the capitalists did not necessarily mean oppos-
ing the Prussian state.

SL: What I meant by Marx as a thinker of historical
dynamism is the way that Marx thinks about industri-
alization as producing constant historical change. It is
in this respect that the 19 th century looks different from
the 18 th century, the century of the French Revolution. In
this sense Marx is quite conscious of holding on to the
French Revolutionary conception of politics under vastly
changed circumstances.

JS: I really think that Marx here is a primarily back-
wards-looking figure, who is reading capitalism's future
out of its past. He sees the future political crisis of capi-
talism being resolved by a movement along the lines of
the French Revolution. His whole economic vision of the
future of capitalism (e.g., the labor theory of value, the
falling rate of profit) is based upon the ideas of David
Ricardo, who wrote in the early 19 th century, the earliest
phase of the Industrial Revolution. Marx saw these con-
ditions, which by the mid-1800s were capitalism's past,
as being capitalism's future. All of Marx's invocations
of dynamism and constant change— we all know the
famous (and actually mistranslated) section of the Com-
munist Manifesto proclaiming that "all that is solid melts
into air"— tend to end up parsed in terms of Marx's past.

SS: Could you provide your translation of "all that is
solid melts into air"?

JS: The German original is "Alles Standische und Ste-
hende verdampft." "Stehende" and "Standische" both
come from the verb "to stand," and is used here as sort
of a pun— it refers to both "that which exists" and the
society of orders, the old regime world that still existed
in Prussia and Austria. "Verdampft" means to "evapo-
rate," to "go up in smoke." What Marx was suggesting
here is that the power of capitalism— capitalist steam
engines ("Dampf" means "steam" in German)— would
"evaporate" the society of orders. This would also bring
to an end the intellectual world that went along with
it: Romanticism, the glorification of the Middle Ages,
and religion. Marx's comment at the end about "man
is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real
conditions of life" is about an age of realism, e.g., liter-
ary realism. One of Marx's friends when he was in exile
in Paris was Heinrich Heine, the great early German
realist.

Mine is a very different take on the passage. The way
it has been interpreted in the 20 th century is that capital-
ism produces many new consumer demands; we have a
world which is constantly changing in communications,

a watershed moment? How did Marx and Engels relate
to post-1848 nationalisms— particularly Polish and
Irish (we'll get to Marx's brand of German nationalism
later)— and how did this shape their political outlook?

JS: The early advocates of nationalism in the first half
of the 19 th century tended to envisage antagonisms and
military conflicts between different countries as the
result of the lusts of monarchs for conquest, glory, and
expansion of their domains. They imagined that when
states were ruled by nations, by peoples, all of this
would come to an end, and nations would spontane-
ously cooperate with each other. These were the ideas
of Giuseppe Mazzini, the leading democrat in 1830s
and '40s Europe, whose organizations Young Italy and
Young Europe were designed to be an alliance of differ-
ent nationalist groups against the existing monarchical
order. The Brussels Democratic Association had an
absolutely fabulous name: The Democratic Association
Having as its Goal the Union and Fraternity of all Peo-
ples. This expresses exactly what nationalists thought.
But in 1848, the old regimes are swept away, bringing
nationalist governments in power and the first thing
that happens as a result is that all these different na-
tionalisms go to war with each other. This is especially
the case in the Austrian Empire, with the Germans,
the Slavs, the Hungarians, and the Italians all at war
with each other. This also happens to some extent in
Prussia with the Germans and the Poles, and in the far
north of Germany between Germans and Danes. That
is, it then became clear that nationalist movements
were profoundly antagonistic to one another and that
nationalism was a militaristic, bellicose ideology. This
was a great disappointment and left many nationalists
frustrated.

Marx and Engels developed an instrumental rela-
tionship to nationalism. For instance, Marx was a fan
of Polish nationalism because it was violently anti-
Russian, and he saw the destruction of the Tsarist Em-
pire as a central revolutionary step. Marx's daughter
Jenny, who followed in her father's political footsteps
and became a left-wing journalist in her own right,
wrote mostly about her support for Irish nationalism,
not communism or the labor movement. Marx and
Engels ended up supporting Irish nationalism, because
they thought it might ultimately destroy the position of
the landowning Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and this, they
thought, would be a blow to English capitalism and
capitalism worldwide. There were lots of other national-
isms that they didn't like, like that of the Slavic peoples of
Eastern Europe— which tended to be anti-German and pro-
Russian. Engels states in Revolution and Counter-Revolution
in Germany, which is a sort of post-mortem of the revolu-
tions of 1848, that if we have a revolution in Germany and the
Czechs are opposed to it, we'll just kill all of them— frankly
genocidal rhetoric. We see here the way that that these disil-
lusioned nationalities will not in fact spontaneously frater-
nize, and so it is necessary to view nationalism through its
usefulness for revolutionary goals.

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The final issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung

artistic trends, etc. That's a 20 th century reinterpretation
of Marx's ideas.

SS: One of "Marx's least successful predictions" from
the Communist Manifesto, you note, is that of the immi-
nent end of nations and nationalism: "National distinc-
tiveness and conflicts between nations disappear more
and more with the development of the bourgeoisie,
with free trade, the world market, the uniformity of
industrial production and the relations of life cor-
responding to them." As you note, the resurgence of
nationalism in pre-1914 Europe belies any straightfor-
ward affirmation of what Marx wrote. But as you also
note, Marx's view nevertheless contained an element
of truth rooted in Marx's own experience. Marx had
participated with the London Fraternal Democrats and
the Brussels Democratic Association, both of which
"were based on the cooperation of radicals of different
nationalities" [207] and, of course, Marx, whose own
perspective was resolutely internationalist, went on
to participate in other organizations dedicated to in-
ternational cooperation. Given this, might we not take
Marx's observation in the Communist Manifesto as in-
dicating, if not straightforward dissolution of national-
ism, then its substantial, if subtle, transformation from
British patriotism or later French revolutionary nation-
alism of the 18 th century? In the history of European
nationalism, how does the revolution of 1848 serve as

SL: Marx's stint as an active revolutionary was spent edit-
ing the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. Reminiscing
about the paper in later years, Engels asserted that "war
with Russia and the creation of a united German republic
were its two main themes" (226).' Explain the logic of
this and, more generally, the strategic orientation of the
paper vis-a-vis other socialists, such as Andreas Gott-
schalk, whom you described as a "True Socialist, [and] a
friend, pupil, and close confidant of [the Young Hegelian
philosopher] Moses Hess" (220). What was Marx's politi-
cal aim in the revolution of 1848? How did Marx's political
development over the previous half decade or so prepare
him for the role he played as editor-in-chief of the New
Rhineland News? How did his position evolve over the
course of the 1848-49 revolution?

JS: You will remember this idea of the "double recur-
rence" of the French Revolution, the literal and analo-
gous. Marx had a "double-track" political strategy in
1848 of achieving both of these revolutionary goals at
once. His work in Cologne on the New Rhineland News
represented the literal, "Jacobin" wing of this strategy
that would call for a united German republic, the over-
throw of the Prussian monarchy, and revolutionary war
with Russia. Marx spent a lot of his time really socking it
to the Prussians: making fun of the monarch, the royal
family, government officials, tax collectors, and army
officers. He stirred up the population against them all.

The Prussian officials got angry because Marx was quite
good at it. And in the western provinces, the Prussians
were widely despised.

The other thing that Marx wanted to do was to or-
ganize the workers and to form a nationwide German
workers' association that would prepare for a new
revolutionary struggle against the capitalists once this
democratic republic was achieved. The first "Jacobin"
part worked pretty well, but the workers' association did
not. Marx's working-class, communist followers were
disappointing. They spent a lot of time drinking in the
cafes and playing dominoes, rather than trying to orga-
nize their fellow workers. In Cologne itself, Gottschalk
headed a very large workers' association— something
like every one in three adult males in the city belonged
to it— but to be honest it would be fair to describe him
and his mentor Moses Hess in contemporary terminolo-
gy as "airheads"— fabulists who believed that everybody
was in favor of communism, and all you had to do was
wait a little while in order for communism to emerge
on its own. Gottschalk was notorious for refusing to
take part in political campaigns. He sabotaged the elec-
tions to the German National Assembly by calling the
democrats bourgeois frauds and calling on workers not
to vote, thereby allowing the Cologne conservatives to
dominate the election. He refused to join the republican
and anti-Prussian campaigns. He was really screwing
everything up, and all the democrats in Cologne were
hostile to Gottschalk— Marx was no exception in this
respect. When Gottschalk was arrested by the Prus-
sian government in June 1848, Marx and his followers
took control of his organization and attempted to use it
to support the democrats. But instead the organization
itself collapsed, so that Marx found himself, in 1848,
pursuing only the Jacobin/democratic half of his politi-
cal agenda.

In the fall of 1848, a period of revolutionary crises,
Marx was busy stirring up efforts to overthrow the
Prussian government, and in November these came
very close to succeeding. He continued in this vein until
the very end of the revolution, until in the spring of 1849
he suddenly changed his mind and began trying to or-
ganize the workers again. He broke with the democrats
and the movement for German National Unity, and
stood aside in the last revolutionary crisis of May 1849.
There's this odd back-and-forth pattern, which would
be the same with the International Workingmen's As-
sociation, within which we see the difficulty Marx had in
getting both prongs of his "double recurrence" to work
simultaneously.

SS: As the U.S. Civil War reached a revolutionary pitch
and Polish nationalists rose in revolt against the czar,
Marx came to help form the International Workingmen's
Association. Respecting Marx's involvement in the as-
sociation and its original aims, you write,

Marx's plans for the association appeared in his
agenda for the First Congress of the IWMA... The
items for action included the advocacy of social
reform— a shorter workday, limitations on women
and children's labor, the replacement of indirect
with direct taxation, an international inquiry into
workplace conditions, and the endorsement of pro-
ducers' cooperatives and trade unions. There were
just two expressly political points, both taken from
the arsenal of nineteenth century radicalism: the
replacement of standing armies with militias; and
"the necessity of annihilating the Muscovite influ-
ence in Europe... [via] the reconstitution of Poland
on a social and democratic basis." (358, ellipsis in
original]

Starting from this basis, how did the IWMA politically
evolve? What developments did it face and what were
the central tensions within it? What were the primary
aims Marx sought to advance in his struggles over the
direction of the First International? How did these evolve
into a struggle with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Ba-
kunin and what was at stake there?

JS: As you can see in the quote, one might think of
Marx's objectives in the IMWA as not involving any spe-
cifically revolutionary goals. He saw the IMWA primarily
in terms of trade union and workplace-related reform
movements. Marx believed that these would ultimately
be revolutionary in nature because of his theory of
surplus value, according to which capitalists gain their
profits by taking part of the product that workers have
produced. Marx saw unions as trying to seize some of
that surplus value back from the capitalists. He hoped
that, if the unions continued this effort with the support
of the IMWA, it would tend to reduce capitalist profits
and lead to a revolutionary crisis. This was a long-term
strategy that would take a while to work out. Marx was
supported in these ideas by the English trade unionists
that formed the backbone of the IWMA and provided it
with most of its meager finances.

The opponents of Marx were revolutionary adherents
of secret societies, who saw the IWMA as a means by
which to overthrow the existing order in Europe. They
were interested above all in this idea of a secret society
organization. At first, this was less the case for Bakunin
than for the followers of the French revolutionary Louis
Auguste Blanqui, who spent the 1830s-1870s plotting
revolutions, trying them out, going to jail, being re-
leased, and plotting new ones.

There were two things that created tensions in the
IWMA. One was its spread, from Northern and West-
ern Europe (where it began) to countries in Southern
Europe, where there weren't really any trade unions,
but where the tradition of secret societies was still very
active. The second was the Franco-Prussian war of
1870, which disrupted politics all across the European
continent. Marx was actually not at first hostile to Ba-
kunin. The two became friends when they met in exile in
France in the late 1840s, and Marx was always very im-
pressed with him. When they met again some 1 5 years
later, Marx wrote to Engels saying that Bakunin was one
of the few people who had moved forward in the inter-
val rather than backwards. Bakunin was an enormous
fan of secret societies, and became involved with some
very dubious ones like that of Sergey Nechayev, who
was famously depicted in Dostoevsky's The Possessed.
He therefore found himself increasingly in opposition

"Marx's liberalism?" continues on page 4

Aging in the afterlife, continued from page 2

experience, assembly, slogan? How does that become a
new kind of political identity? An important development
in the iconography of strike debt was borrowing the red
square from the Quebec students. The red square was
taken as an emblem of us all being in the "red," that is,
subjugated to debt. It was a uniform symbol that took the
form of a wearable piece of felt, so that it was actually
very bodily, intimate, tactile, but also irregular and
unifying, as it links the bodies of the debtors to others.

We know we are not going to be able to pay off our
debts; and we are scared and isolated. What does it
mean to embrace that as a common condition, and
turn it into a militant refusal of the debt system? The
actual gesture of burning the debt symbol becomes
a performative ritual on the part of the debtors. Over
the summer there were debt burning rituals that
were incorporated into the assembly at the one-year
anniversary of Occupy.

All the aesthetic, artistic, and symbolic dimensions
of strike debt are interwoven with analysis, publishing
efforts, actions, and assemblies and that is what is
qualitatively new, in terms of the contemporary artistic
field. The elaboration of non-expert amateur props,
these are aesthetic experiments, which, with the
support of the institutional and formalized art world,
such as the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the
Creative Time Summit, and artists like Martha Rosier,
help secure resources and plug in more people. The
point is that these are practices and ideas grounded in
the experimental laboratory that is contemporary art.

Gregg Horowitz: It is unclear to me why the concept of
the death of art even matters. Does anybody organize
their practice, in light of this concept, any longer?
Yates's presentation affirmed that, for me, there is
almost nothing going on there, you have a break, an
end, but the idea of death has sort of vanished. If the
death of art is not all that useful in the self-
understanding of contemporary art practice, what about
the "art" concept? Let's just suppose, art is dead, and
what that means is that we cannot understand our
practices in light of that concept. Why is it so hard to
give up a concept, the passing of which has been noted
in various ways?

Giving up the concept turns out to be hard, and we do
not give up the concept by holding on to another
concept, which is that of the death of art. That is the
way in which we hold on to the concept of art. Although
I have written probably too much on the death of art, I
find the concept increasingly inscrutable. I know what it
means for a cultural practice to cease being
meaningful, either because it falls out of the cultural
repertoire, as is happening to the practice of striking
film prints of movies, which will make a difference in
how we experience movies, or because it becomes
mere routine, like saying "Have a good day" at the end
of a conversation.

If you listen to that set of words these days, they are
at a state of involution. It is the sound of routinization of
what was a meaningful cultural practice. But that can't
be the meaning of art being dead, since art has become
practically inescapable in recent years and, while the
interpretation and consumption of it can't keep up with
the flow of product, the increasing volume of
interpretation and consumption indicates that the
practice of art has not become merely one of routine.

The near-ubiquity of art and its products in our
everyday worlds must be what is behind the peculiar
thought expressed in Paul Mason's article that the
aesthetic and artistic dimensions of Occupy somehow
signal the death of contemporary art. Although the
significance of Occupy has yet to play itself out enough
for anyone to draw a conclusion about its
consequences, one would think that, with its openly
political ambitions, what it would represent the end of
would be, say, the hegemony of neoliberalism. How one
could come to care instead about the impact of Occupy
on the gallery system is, on the face of it, risible. But art
is not simply ubiquitous. It is like kudzu: where anything
grows now, art grows, too, and faster. But this is a sign
that art is not a dead practice but rather a fervidly,
strappingly healthy one. Such was also the sentiment
expressed by the Dadaists when they declared, for
instance, "Die Kunst is tot! Es lebe die neue
Maschinenkunst Tatlins!" The practice in the name of
which art is declared dead, the practice liberated by the
death of art, is machine-art. "Art is dead! Long live art!"

Art is unkillable.

But what I find most inscrutable about the sentiment
is not the superficial thought that art is dead but the
underlying thought that art ever was alive. Although
Hegel never said that art had died, but rather that it was
and remained on the side of its highest destiny a thing
of the past, which is a much different thought, he
nonetheless revealed that the myth of living works of
art was an essential part of the way the practice of art
lives on in its post-classical "after-life," in the age, that
is, of its self-awareness as a practice with its own,
autonomous values and ambitions. It is a mythic fate
that art throws on to its past. From this point of view, it
becomes thinkable that the supposed life of art is a
backward formation that enables art to die again and
again, to remain, in other words, perpetually undead, so
that post-artistic practices can remain vital in evading
the same fate. The death of art is, we might say, a
meme of contemporary artistic consciousness in which
is distortedly expressed a discontent with the increasing
artistic encrustation of the contemporary world. Better:
not just as a meme, it is a zombie idea and, since the
content of the idea is zombiehood itself, it is a meta-
zombie idea whose importance lies not in its truth-
value as such but in its special place in zombie self-
reflection.

Because zombies have become ubiquitous in
contemporary culture— nearly as ubiquitous as art, but
not quite— there is something both cheap and meta-
meta in my recruiting them into the project of making
the death of art intelligible, of metabolizing it, and
digesting it. But the contemporary zombie figure is
actually a pretty good image for the undeadness of art.
The zombie was a figure of Vodun magic, a dead person
reanimated by witchcraft; scary, but really nothing more
than an embodiment of Benjamin's idea that we live in
an age when not even the dead are safe. But the
contemporary zombie is not just reanimated. It is back

for blood. To the return of the dead we have added
undying hunger.

Death is the radical outside of hegemonic systems
that pretend to close off all alternatives. As radical
outsideness, death offers the prospect of nothing but
hope. But the figure of the zombie undermines even this
source of hope, for where death is, there old needs
gather and swarm. For us, not even death represents
hope.

There is another way to understand the contemporary
flesh-eating zombie precisely as a figure of hope. The
zombie is embodied need when need's fateful entry into
the web of social norms is taken off the table.

There is a new zombie movie called Warm Bodies in
which apparently zombies can fall in love. The zombie is
the figure that embodies our horror at human need, that
it may not be adequately mediated by social norms. But
one might turn that right around and say that that's
precisely what's hopeful about the figure of the zombie,
for in it we imagine a moment of hunger utterly outside
of social appropriation. The zombie, in this sense,
represents the conjunction of social death and undying
human need, the conjunction that, for the Marxist left,
has been expressed in the thought that the proletariat is
simultaneously the inside and outside of capitalism: the
conjunction of social death and that dying need. The
zombie will not lay down its need in exchange for a bag
of food. It wants life, which is the one thing it cannot
have. The zombie, in this light, is a figure which both
embodies the limit of a social order and the imagination
of its recommencement.

And so with art: the undeadness of art rests not on an
earlier life, but rather on our need to imagine the
outside of what we have now, to hope for it, in the form
of what cannot die.

Q&A

What about practices that reference past political
movements— what the posters looked like in the Bolshevik
Revolution, for example, or the aesthetic of the 1960s New
Left? It seems like there are deliberate attempts to
reference the past even though, as Yates put it, "we are not
[invested in] looking back ", and called saw Occupy as a
break, as something fundamentally new. But what is the
importance in this refusal to look back, especially because
we stilt live in capitalism, and there are no revolutionary
politics to speak of right now?

YM: The importance of historical memory and
intergenerational dialogue can be overstated and that is
clear in Tidal and in Occupy. What my generation drew
as lessons from the past came from movements like
ACT-UP, the Black Panthers, and radical labor
struggles. When I say that we must resist looking back,
that is really about resisting melancholy, of recognizing
where things are now: the occupation in the parks was a
crack, a rupture, and created a new kind of space. But
now we no longer have the park and it is not a moment
that we can ever really recreate. We want to talk about it
in terms of the principle of direct action, of living and
caring for one another without the mediation of the
state, without the mediation of capital, as something
that really intervened in the taken-for-grantedness of
capitalism, of people being alone and isolated, and
generating an opening-up of the imagination of about
how to live differently. It is pre-figurative politics. People
will say that Occupy changed the conversation, it
changed the horizon of inequality, but it is not just about
that. Occupy is also about practicing an alternative form
of living relative to one another. That is where the
resistance comes in. It is also about the actual practice:
how you do it.

The point about not looking back is to not be nostalgic
for the park, for that moment of everyone being
physically present. But it is also about the Left's
melancholy for the whole Left. The whole Left is also
attached to lost ideals. Its identity is often parasitically
dependent on the fact that things don't dramatically
change. That's something Occupy really disrupted. Not
looking back does not mean, don't be historical, don't
remember, but rather, don't be dominated by the past,
whether the past of Occupy, or the past of the Left,
because the Left tends toward melancholic fixation.

GH: Then the question, "Will art be possible in the
absence of the Left?" becomes, I think, really pressing —
which itself seems to beg a sort of interesting question,
which is not what we mean by art, by the death of art,
but what do we mean by the Left? And I want to ask this
in a non-melancholic spirit. If nostalgia for the park is
already on the horizon— how long ago was this? The fact
is that Occupy, which is admirable in all sorts of ways, is
not yet a political movement. If a year is a space on
which nostalgia can perch, then we don't have a politics
here. I want to make this point broadly: what it means to
say that the Left is attached to melancholy. The problem
is not that we lack revolutionary politics. We should be
so lucky to lack that. What we lack is politics, period. It
is that simple. And we don't know how to make sense of
the way in which the political spectrum has collapsed
around us. This may be a break, this may be something
new, naked capitalism, but it is capitalism without a
political emphasis. But if there is no contradiction being
given form, then the prospect of giving form, that I take
many of us care about, is not even on the table. So we
are going to get really great posters and banners, but
that next development in which there is a kind of outer
politics, that still seems to me un-approached. I hope
Occupy becomes nostalgia. Let that nostalgia flower at
this moment.

In regards to how what appears as new is actually old, how
might we understand that dynamic, in light of the
domination of capital in a society that repeatedly
subsumes the appearance of the new as it flares up? How
can we understand this dynamic of old and new in terms of
the possibility of political organization or the actual new?

PM: This is the big problem of human history. To
paraphrase Marx: the past hangs like a millstone
around our necks. People made the French Revolution;
they imagined that they were ancient Greeks and
Romans. People try to act politically in the 21 st century;
they think about Lenin and the storming of the Winter

Palace. This is the value in the disappearance of
historical memory. In a way, the extinction of the Left of
the 1 9 th century and first half of the 20 th century brings
its own loss, because something can be learned from
historical inheritance, but it also clears the way for
people to think in new ways. One of the fabulous things
about Occupy was the total irrelevance of the past left,
of the history of the Left, from its discussions and
actions. No one was trying to form a new revolutionary
party or argue about reformism verses revolutionary
activity.

GH: The issue of how to save Western culture is not
about saving what is on the table anymore but about
asking what is on the table that might be worth
destroying. That is, whether there is any orientation we
can derive from it, that will allow is to see our way
through the present, to give our politics a structure, to
give our politics some normative force, or something
like that. There is something very odd about the state of
aesthetic discourse right now. Everyone is scrambling
for a normative orientation. But I think we should step
back for a moment and at least entertain the possibility
that we cannot discern that and ask what a normative
orientation would mean right now. So, as you say, you
can declare art dead right now. Go ahead, do it, I give
you permission. The problem is you get nothing from it.
The juice in declaring it over has dried up.

YM: Imagine this: suddenly people in Occupy say, "That
is beautiful." You see some shit and say, "That is a
beautiful action and that is a beautiful banner." It is like
militant beauty, militant Left, and it is a new thing. I
want to redefine the notion of beauty. I am not scared
that the aesthetic is going to fuck up the politics,
because the politics are happening, and there is a new
space for aesthetics.

AV: Isn't the aestheticization of politics fascism? How is
your proposal not the same thing?

YM: Well that was the Benjaminian argument. It totally
makes sense with something like Triumph of the Will. It
is the fact that aesthetics and politics are inseparable. It
is not a fascist Gesamtkunstwerk, but the fact that there
are moments we experience and feel that appear in a
modern mode deeply embedded in our project.
Benjamin would be the dialectical counterpart. That is
the danger, to fall into the aestheticization of politics, in
the old sense. The new sense of aesthetics and politics
is not fascist and awful, but actually, "Oh my god that is
a beautiful demonstration." Is it fascist to say that?

PM: What people miss about the death of art is that
Utopian moment: The idea of the merging of art in
everyday life, not the fact that art is not with us as an
aspect of the disappearance of the Left. It seems to me
that the counterpart to that is the treatment of Occupy

as an aesthetic event, as a piece of performance art.
It is a very striking idea. But not an accurate one. The
American version is more prone to branding and
aestheticization. But if you put Occupy into the
international context, it seems to be part of a much
larger social movement, like in Greece, which is in
fact too large and too political to be contained by
these aesthetic categories. But the fact that it so
quickly turned into an aestheticized object is a sign of
the present day weakness of the politics. This seems
to be a call to deepen the political aspects of it.

GH: We are in a moment when our political weakness
is being tested all over. But so too is the strength
therefore of a kind of quasi-autonomous
aestheticizing mechanism. Stuff gets turned into
spectacle, it is not a deliberate tactic on anybody's
part because they are not apparently depoliticized. It
just becomes spectacular so immediately. Tom
Finkelpearl, the director of the Queens Museum, who
works with all sorts of social practice art, asked me a
question I never thought of asking myself, "Why does
everyone want to know, is it art? Why does that
question matter?" But it does matter; it's kind of a
driving question. It brought to mind a perspective of
one of the originators of social practice art, Gordon
Matta-Clark, although he did not have the concept for
it at the time. Now I hate going to galleries because I
am afraid I am going to be fed the art. I feel I am in
some bizarre version of degenerative politics: here is
the stuff itself, eat it. And the concept oddly becomes
so robust, that it is almost hard to think about social
practice without thinking about art, or political
practice. IP

Transcribed by Chris Mansour and Bret Schneider

1. Paul Mason. "Does Occupy Signal the Death of
Contemporary Art?" BBC News, 30 April 2012, available
online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17872666.

2. Hito Steyerl, "The New Flesh: Material Afterlives of
Images," available online at http://www.kracauer-lectures.
de/en/sommer-2013/hito-steyerl/.

3. Mason, "Occupy."

4. Plato, Republic, trans. C.V.C Reeves INewYork: Hackett,
2004), §398b.

5. Anonymous, Tidal Occupy Theory, February 2012, 15. The
issue is available online at
http://tidalmag.org/pdf/tidal4_block-by-block.pdf.

MarXS liberalism?, continued from page 3

to Marx. This eventually led to a break between the two,
and a struggle for control of the IWMA. As part of this
struggle, Marx decided that the IWMA had to endorse the
idea of workers' political parties. At the time, very few
workers' political parties existed. There were two com-
peting ones in Germany at the time, but Marx trusted
neither entirely. This led to a ferocious struggle between
Marx and his followers, and frankly every other element
in the IWMA. In the 1872 Hague conference, Marx's fol-
lowers were victorious and they expelled Bakunin. They
then moved the headquarters of the IWMA to New York,
basically with the intention of destroying the organiza-
tion; Marx realized that plans for revolution probably
had to be shelved after the repression of the Paris Com-
mune. Just as Marx took control of the organization, he
chose to bring it to an end.

SL: Why was Marx concerned to maintain the IWMA as
an open, democratic political activity? A quarter century
before, Marx and Engels had fought to publicize the ac-
tivities of the Communist League, though it is true that,
after the reverses of 1849, the Communist League took
on a secret, underground form. Still, is it fair to say that
the struggles in the IWMA repeat his struggles in 1847
for an open form of politics and publication?

JS: I think so. The Communist League did adopt a
clandestine form after 1849, but that's because open
political activity was essentially impossible in an age
of revolutionary repression. Marx was always a propo-
nent of open politics. He was a newspaper editor— this
was always one of his chief forms of political activism.
Marx was suspicious of secret societies and believed
wholeheartedly in open politics. One of the ironies of
his struggles against Bakunin was that Marx was con-
vinced Bakunin was trying to undermine the IWMA by
smuggling in his followers in order to form a secret
society within the IWMA itself. This was actually not the
case, and it was ironically one of Marx's allies who was
proposing this idea, the veteran German revolution-
ary Johann Philipp Becker. Marx flew off the handle at
Becker's suggestions, and thought he was being ma-
nipulated by Bakunin.

SS: Two of Marx and Engels's key associates in the Ger-
man workers movement were Ferdinand Lassalle and
Wilhelm Liebknecht. Eventually, it was Liebknecht, who
opposed Lassalle's coziness with Bismarck, who came to
enjoy Marx and Engels's support. One crucial division be-
tween the two, and what eventually divided Lassalle from
Marx as well, was again the question of nationalism.
As veterans of 1848, they all supported in some sense
the cause of Germany, but Marx articulated this as an
anti-Prussian demand for a German republic. Yet, in the
face of eventual German unification enforced by Prussia,
Marx and Liebknecht were forced to make something of
it. This meant coming to some sort of terms with the fol-
lowers of Lassalle. What were the fundamental underly-
ing tensions expressed by Liebknecht's opposition to the
Lassalleans and to what extent were these overcome?

JS: There were three issues here. One was the ques-
tion of the nature of a united German nation-state.

Would it be a GroBdeutsche one that included the ethnic
Germans of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or would it
be a Kleindeutsch one, without those Germans, and so
exclusively dominated by Prussia? Marx was always
a Grofldeutscher and, certainly, Liebknecht was a fol-
lower of Marx on this point, while Lassalle was strongly
opposed. But the issue was ultimately decided by war:
The Prussians trounced the Austrians in 1866, there-
fore Bismarck's state would be a Prussian-dominated
Kleindeutsch state. Marx was unhappy with this, but he
understood that he had to come to terms with it.

The second issue was whether the German nation-
state would be a democratic republic or not. Liebknecht,
as a veteran of the revolution of 1 848, was a strong
adherent of the idea of a democratic republic. Lassalle
was too, though he flirted with the idea of a constitu-
tional monarchy, and had conspiratorial meetings with
Bismarck. This tension too was decided by history. The
united German nation-state persecuted both the follow-
ers of Liebknecht and Lassalle equally, and the follow-
ers of Lassalle increasingly became opponents of the
existing monarchical order.

The third issue, and this was the really tricky one, was
the question of relations between the labor movement
and liberal-progressive parties in the German govern-
ment. Lassalle and his followers clearly despised the
liberals and made deals with the conservatives, while
Liebknecht and his followers were willing to make deals
with at least those democrats that shunned the conser-
vatives. This was an issue that, even after the two wings
of the labor movement united at the Gotha Congress of
1875, remained alive in the German socialist party. There
were some who felt that opposing liberalism was their
primary aim, even if it meant collaborating with conser-
vative authorities. Others felt that opposing the conser-
vative authorities should be the primary aim, even if that
meant collaborating with the liberals. IP

Transcribed by Tom Willis

1. See Friedrich Engels, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
(1848-49)" available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1 884/03/1 3.htm. In that 1884 piece, Engels observes,
"The political program of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung consisted
of two main points: A single, indivisible, democratic German re-
public and war with Russia, including the restoration of Poland."

Issue #58 /July-August 201 3

Aging in the afterlife

The many deaths of art

Anton Vidokle, Gregg Horowitz, Paul Mattick, and Yates McKee

Last spring, in response to Paul Mason's article "Does
Occupy Signal the Death of Contemporary Art?, " the
Platypus Affiliated Society hosted an event on the "death
of art. "' Speakers included Julieta Aranda who was
represented by Anton Vidokle, Gregg Horowitz, Paul
Mattick, and Yates McKee. The discussion was moderated
by Chris Mansour and was held at the New School in New
York on February 23, 2013. Complete video of the event
can be found online at <http://media.platypus1917.org/
aging-in-the-afterlife-the-many-deaths-of-art/>. What
follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Anton Vidokle: These are Julieta Aranda's opening
remarks: It was with a strange sense of deja vu that I
accepted the invitation to attend yet another funeral for
art. Of course I have heard about all the previous ones,
but this is the first time I have been invited to attend one.
As an artist it is hard to understand the compulsion to
establish our sense of art history through the recurrent
announcements of "the death or art." Art seems to
be constantly dying, but we never talk much about its
birth. It must have been stubbornly reborn on countless
occasions, since we are here again, trying to measure its
vital signs. I tried to do a bit of a research into the many
deaths of art— but I was quickly overwhelmed: In one
way or another, we have been trying to put art in a coffin
and nail it shut for the past 2,000 years.

In the 1980s— during the art market boom— there
were plenty of death calls: the death of painting,
the death of modernism, and also the death of
postmodernism. Meanwhile, the New York art market
was very much alive, fueled by the usual suspects:
speculators, investors, real estate developers, social
climbers, and so forth. Of course as with everything
that is artificially inflated, there was an eventual market
crash, and this crash had many casualties. Many
galleries disappeared, and many artists' careers dried
out. But this wasn't understood to be the death of art as
it had been previously announced.

I am skeptical about the Peter and the Wolf
announcements of an imminent death of art— this time
in its "contemporary" incarnation. For me, it is more
interesting to question the favorable disposition —
almost a wish— that we have towards the demise of
art. The death sentence on contemporary art comes
not only because the current operative model for
contemporary art is deficient. (Under the current
model, meaning is often quickly emptied out from
objects and images, and market artists are a renewable
resource.] But this wish also comes partly because we
want a new big thing, we want the new thing to come
now, and we want to be the new thing while the market
is booming. As Hito Steyerl, a German video artist
and writer, points out in her Kracauer Lecture, "The
New Flesh: Material Afterlives of Images," "To declare
something over or dead is a form of production, that
purposefully kills off something in order to launch new
commodities or attract attention." 2

To assume a one-to-one equivalence between
contemporary art and the art-market for contemporary
art— so that we can pass a summary judgment and
quickly condemn it to death as an evil that needs to be
eradicated— would be like holding a perfunctory trial,
the outcome of which we know in advance.

What happens, in this case, to artistic practices that
have no market value? And, what happens to art that
is currently produced in situations where there is no
market? Is this art not contemporary? Is this art also
dying?

If we choose to talk about the art of the past 50
years only in the ways in which it has been coded by
capital, we may be simplifying the body we are trying
to find, and giving it an outline we can reject. Paul
Mason's recent article for the BBC refers exclusively
to a contemporary art that is full of obscenely rich
"concept artists," whose work is executed by "minions."
And, subsequently, that artists involved in Occupy
are pitted against a world described as "the white-
walled gallery: with its air of non-committal, its
preference for meaningless gesture, its reliance on
interpretation by the viewer, and its extreme focus on
commercialization." 3

The problem is that, if we accept the above definition
of contemporary art's body, we are (again) defining this
body; we are ready to bury it as that of a white male. In
the interest of the art that I care for, I feel compelled
to challenge that definition. While the structure of the
gallery system is indeed troublesome, to use it as a
synonym for all of the contemporary artistic practices
outside of the work of the artists affiliated with Occupy
would be a gross misrepresentation; more so, it
would be one that persists in depicting the West, and
specifically New York, as the center of the world. While
this is true for New Yorkers, it is not necessarily true for
everybody else.

We could go ahead and declare that contemporary
art, as we know it, is dead or dying, and replace it with
the next new black: today, Occupy; tomorrow, something
else. But to be ready to broadly dismiss contemporary
art in a summary gesture, replacing it entirely with
a "new" understanding of art that is advocating an
obligatory commitment to explicit leftist political
ideologies and a sense of social purpose, doesn't
actually sound so new to me. Hasn't this conversation
been going on continuously since the 1920s?

In fact, it makes me think of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, and of Cambodia's Year Zero, or of Plato's
position towards poets in the Republic-.

But, for our own good, we ourselves should
employ a more austere and less pleasure-giving

poet and story-teller, one who would imitate the
speech of a more decent person and who would
tell his stories in accordance with the patterns we
laid down when we first undertook the education of
our soldiers. 4

Good intentions aside: isn't this model slightly
prescriptive?

As far as meaning in contemporary art goes, when I
see the work of artists like Walid Raad or Jimmie
Durham or Katerina Seda, what I see is the ways in
which they successfully smuggle into the dominant
narrative of histories and images what would otherwise
not be accessible. I do not consider their practice less
meaningful just because they enjoy a considerable
degree of success, and I certainly appreciate the
histories and images that they smuggle in that retain all
of their original political complexity and their
uncomfortable qualities, without being flattened or
prepackaged into ready-to-eat morsels.

It is extremely problematic that there is a financial
apparatus currently rigged around contemporary art—
since it may be the biggest instance of an art market
that has ever been in operation. On top of this, the
concomitant professionalization of the art system, which
aims at feeding this market through a proliferation of
expensive art schools and training programs put in
place to train domesticable and reliable artists that can
produce viable commodities, only adds fuels to the fire.

However, it is possible to understand to a certain
degree the willingness of certain artists, but not all, to
enter this problematic situation. It has been tacitly
agreed that artists shouldn't concern themselves with
money. And while the idea of making a living from art is
interpreted as being morally corrupt, there is no
alternative system in operation to guarantee the welfare
of artists. Artists who "sell out" are bad. But if they
refuse to do that, then what happens to them? How are
they supposed to make a living? It has always been
unclear to me how are artists supposed to take care of
mundane needs such as paying rent, going to the
dentist, having dinner, and taking a child to the doctor.

The current conditions of production of art are dire.
There has been a shrinking of unpredictable spaces, an
erosion of relationships that are not professional, and a
disappearance of a bohemian and non-domesticated
world. This may be a temporary condition, only
applicable "while the market lasts", but it is a damaging
condition nonetheless, a condition that could render the
soul homeless.

As I look at the shape-shifting body of art on its
contemporary inception— a body that doesn't seem to fit
its coffin or even its own definition— it has become clear
to me that contemporary art may not be as simple as
the single thread constructed that we try to collect as a
digestible unit. Art produced today has many paradigms,
some of them depleted, others full of potential. Art will
transform, as it always has historically, and become
something other than contemporary; an art that we
don't know yet— and which we will only know when it
has arrived. Instead of a coffin, with all of its irreversible
solemnity, it may be better to make sure that there are
fertile conditions in place for the new art to come.

The patient will live! Let's build a better world for her.

Paul Mattick: I will begin with Paul Mason's suggestion
that "Occupy signaled the death of contemporary art."
Since Occupy's wonderful but short life has been over
for some time, while contemporary art is rolling on, with
its full panoply of artists, dealers, writers, auctions,
museums, and collectors, the obvious response to this
is, "No." Mason's own article confirms this, as it focuses
on an Occupy activist turning, once the movement has
been dispersed, to market her agitprop effort as
contemporary art. On the other hand, one should
beware of the obvious answer, and I will take another
look at this question at the end.

It will be useful to define the chief term under
discussion, or at least give my definition, so that we can
know if and when we are talking about the same thing.
"Art," since it evolved in Europe in the late 18 th century,
has been the name for a social practice of valuing— and
of collecting, making, attending to, and displaying —
objects and performances capable of signifying the
discernment of those who appreciate them. In a smaller
mouthful, art gives body to taste and so makes it visible.
The exercise of taste for artworks, like the exercise of
choice, attests to the chooser's freedom from necessity,
or at least to a willingness to disregard it. "Necessity,"
in the commercial culture that came into existence with
modern society, means above all a concern with
money— making it and spending it. Art developed its
enormous importance within capitalism, the first
culture in history to be dominated by the use of money,
because it provides a social space for demonstrating
freedom from commercial necessity. Art, the opposite of
wage labor and capitalist entrepreneurship alike, is
work done for love, not money; its collection and
enjoyment signify a spiritual set of interests, raising the
art-lover above the material concerns of "everyday life."
It is this that makes art so valuable and expensive.

Thus, in the 19 th century, art allowed the newly
ascendant bourgeoisie to claim the mantle of social
superiority formerly worn by the landed aristocracy for
whom paintings, architecture, music, dance, etc. had
been not art but part of the paraphernalia of daily life. In
the 20 th century, "modern" art spoke for the claims of
bourgeois society to have established values of its own,
with, for instance, the motorcar sometimes
supplementing and sometimes re-embodying the
classic grace of the Parthenon.

The ascendancy of the United States, a self-made
country without a feudal past, after World War II
produced a new twist in the modernist version of art.
While a turn-of-the-century magnate like J. P. Morgan
still looked to Europe for the artworks required to show
that America had arrived, post-war art-lovers, and
indeed the American government itself, found the
highest stage of artistic development in the new
American art. This bourgeoisie, an American one,
lacked the bad conscience of its forebears; now the
most avant-garde art— originally produced to mark the
distance between the artist and the bourgeois— became
the official art of business society.

At various points in this long trajectory, the idea has
arisen that art could come to an end. In the early 1800s,
famously, when art was just beginning, Hegel believed
art would, like religion, cede its cultural significance to
philosophy; alas, I speak from the perspective of a
professional philosopher: Philosophy has turned out to
be of negligible cultural significance compared to art.
The radical upheavals following World War I gave rise to
various forms of the idea that the revolutionary
transformation of daily life might lead to the absorption
of art, in the form of industrial design, into life. Such
ideas were encouraged by the habit of looking at art as
pursuing an autonomous, unified history, with one
"school" succeeded another "school": a history directed,
following the Hegelian model, towards the realization of
a goal can be imagined to reach some sort of end when
the goal is attained.

discovered that all was not past, that there
was a present in which we might live. We
cracked history open, and time seemed full.
Everything was happening in the Now.

Then came the eviction, and we were
dispersed. In the aftermath of the park, we
mourn what was lost. We know that we can
never fully separate from it. It is inside us,
it haunts us, it speaks to us. We are bound
by it. But it does not tie us down to the past.
The beloved whispers: "you must learn to
live. Now."

This means letting go of that perfect
future where all the wrongs will be right.
That future will always be postponed, not
yet open, unavailable—and thus an object
of melancholic sadness in advance. We do
not wait and lament.

The storms of Wall Street are unrelenting.
It is what they call progress. There is no
shelter, no park, where we can ride this
out. We have to learn to live in the open.
There comes a moment when we know
that we can't go on. But we go on. It's easy
to break up. To continue with love is hard.
Don't be afraid. Don't look back. 5

The success of "advanced" art in the post-war period
gave rise to the related idea of the "death of the avant-
garde." An idea with much truth to it, since after 1960
the avant-garde system, with critics and other cultural
intermediaries alerting maverick collectors to the
masterpieces of the future, did in fact break down. The
critics almost uniformly hated Pop art, but collectors
bought it anyway, and soon the critics had to like it. With
avant-gardism's demise, the pluralism of the art world
gradually became unmistakable, though attempts were
made to hold it at bay by defining new avant-gardes,
especially by academic writers and art historians like
the members of the October circle. But, whatever the
success of this attempt in academia, the art world saw
the death of the critic, as control over taste was
exercised by curators, auctioneers, and collectors
themselves.

This process cannot be fully understood without
reference to the development of capitalism itself in the
same period. The crisis of the mid-1970s announced the
end of the great post-war economic boom. Henceforth
capitalism's dynamism shifted increasingly away from
productive investment towards financial speculation. We
all know the results: the globalization of capital, on the
one hand, and growing inequality in the distribution of
wealth, on the other. With a new international elite
concentrating a hitherto unknown share of the world's
wealth in its hands, art— museum and gallery art, at any
rate [the situation is rather different for art music] —
became basically a possession of the global one
percent, albeit a luxury good whose value still requires
general visibility and appreciation.

What might be said above all to have met its death as
this state of affairs developed is the role of educated
people, whom Pierre Bourdieu called "the dominated
fraction of the dominating class," as the arbiters of
cultural value. This is part of a general devaluation of
the thing once celebrated as "culture," manifested in
such phenomena as the decline of liberal arts education
and growing un- and under-employment of the
educated, now condemned by the new terms of a credit-
enabled capitalism to lifelong debt peonage. This has
had effects directly for artists, and one of the interesting
things, which was mentioned in Aranda's comments, is
the material disappearance of bohemian life: cheap
rent, affordable studios, and so forth.

Occupy was above all the protest of this social
fraction: the devalued educated. As such it was, as a
friend observed to me, a symptom of the same condition
which has given rise to talk of the death of art: the end
of art as a cultural possession of the educated middle
class. This neither means that art is over, as the social
practice that has been with us for the last three
centuries, nor that people will stop making things and
performances for a wide variety of purposes, inside and
outside the art world proper. It does mean that the
conditions of art making and appreciation have altered
in important ways that it would be well worth taking
some time to try to understand.

Yates Mckee: Since there's a tone of morbidity and
death and loss in the air, I wanted to read from Tidal 4, a
piece called "On Love, Loss, and Movement":

We came to the park in mourning.

We had lost so much. We turned mourning

into militancy and felt awakened. We

I do think there is a crisis surrounding the death and
definition of contemporary art and its identity. I am
intrigued by this question of ends, deaths, and finalities,
but it does seem to risk making that into a grand
tradition— the negative dialectic of death and rebirth.
On the one hand, we want to avoid any apocalyptic
declarations, since we know that is naive. On the other
hand, it should still be possible to try to describe and
account for a break. Recently in the U.S., Occupy opened
up space to rethink the nature of cultural practice,
of the relationship between art and politics, in ways
that were anticipated by the most exciting currents in
contemporary art. At the moment, some of the taken-
for-granted protocols of contemporary art have fallen
apart, but that doesn't mean there is no more art.

Here is a little dialectic image: "the people's library"
at Zucotti Park in October of 2011. The librarian created
an arts and culture section, where you could read a copy
of October magazine devoted to "the contemporary"
from 2010. On the right is a copy of the Occupy Wall St
Journal that is being displayed on the wall at MoMA,
with the special poster edition, with designs by Josh
MacPhee, Paul Chan, and other contemporary artists.
What does it mean for the history of the avant-garde
to pop up in an avant-garde political practice, and vice
versa, what does it mean for cultural products of that
movement to end up back in MoMA— even after MoMA
had been a site of struggle for Occupy with the struggle
and lockout of the Sotheby's workers?

Much of Occupy was anticipated, consciously
and unconsciously, in a lot of the most interesting
contemporary art of the past ten years: Thomas
Hirschhorn, Sharon Hayes, and the whole field of
social practices. It is not as if Occupy came about
as a movement and then artists came along and got
involved. In fact, artists were deeply involved from
the very beginning of Occupy in August, 2011, and
their involvement has to do with opening a space of
imagination, something absent from the Left in the US
for a long time.

The magazine Tidal provided the impetus for post-
May Day organization. A series of assemblies emerged
that started discussing the possibility of making debt
the focus of our political movement. Like Occupy, people
having conversations in public space, with the crucial
feature that people psychologically and emotionally were
able to "come out" and to have a testimonial experience.
This was a groundbreaking moment in getting "strike
debt" in motion. Student debt was a key focus, but we
also addressed the housing and mortgage crisis, which
were central to the concerns of Occupy.

Tidal is also an example of a practice that artists
started in which the visual, aesthetic, and graphic
elements are really crucial. But it doesn't define itself
in terms of art. It takes advantage of artistic platforms,
cultivates an ongoing dialogue with the art world, and
mobilizes its resources. It is not like art is dead, and
now we have a new avant-garde with Occupy, but it is
a spectrum. It was a tactical choice to engage with art,
which can be very critical and productive, and breaks
us out of a frame when it becomes one of the primary
platforms for the intellectual discourse of the movement.

How do we visualize something as abstract as debt,
as something that is embodied and very immediate?
How do debtors respond to one another in an image,

"Aging in the afterlife" continues on page 4